TEELING DISTILLERY

Debeli is a huge lover and worshiper of both whiskey and beer, so I was thinking of visiting either Jameson distillery or Guinness brewery while in Dublin. What I didn’t know then was that the production of Jameson has been transferred to Cork and that Guinness storehouse is more about selling the merchandise than showing you the real process of brewing. However, what we did at the end, it turned out to be even better!

Teeling Distillery was established by the Teeling brothers, John and Stephen, whose father, John Teeling had founded the Cooley Distillery in 1987. The distillery is now located close to where Walter Teeling, an ancestor of the family had established first distillery in 1782.

The distillery is situated in the Liberties area of Dublin, an area that was once outside the medieval walls surrounding the city. Since different laws applied for the people outside the walls, or let say there weren’t any, when it came to selling, distributing or producing alcohol, it was a promised land for various small and big distilleries. It was liberty over there, hence the name Liberties.

At the end of the 19th century in this small area there were three biggest distilleries in Europe: George Roe distillery, Jameson and Marrowbone Lane & John Power’s John Lane distillery. The area was called The Golden Triangle.

Political instability, wars, prohibitions, and competition, like the Scottish whiskey produced in a modern way, led to closing of majority distilleries in the second half of the 20th century. But this, rather small, Teeling distillery,established in 2015, it’s the first one to be opened in the past 125 years!!!

The distillery offers guided tours and a package of couple of whiskey tastings for a price of 15/30 €. If you add a small discount that Debeli found, we decided it was now or never to witness the making of this popular drink.

The production of whiskey begins with grounding unmalted and malted barley into a coarse flour called grist. Next move is to add water to extract the starch from the porridge like material. This usually takes around 6 hours, after which the drained, sweet liquid (wort) is dumped into fermenters to start the process of making alcohol.

The wort is actually beer of approximately 8% ABV, called wash and the leftovers of the porridge are sold to the farmers for feeding the animals.

Yeast is added to the wash, which helps to resolve the sugar while making both carbon dioxide and alcohol. After a couple of days, the wash is distilled. Three times.

Fermenters

Teeling distillery uses the old Dublin shape and style of stills from the 19th century, so their three copper pot stills have been handcrafted in Italy. The 15 000, 10 000 and 9 000 liters pot stills are named after John’s daughters: Alison, Natalie and Rebecca.

Pot stills

The first distillation is done in Alison, then it goes to Natalie to be finished in Rebecca. I don’t know if John planned to have three daughters only to name his pot still after them or it was a pure coincidence 🙂

Destiled wash

Maturation and cask influence is the most important part of making good whiskey because more than half of the flavors comes from the way the whiskey has been stored. According to Irish laws a whiskey to be called Irish whiskey has to be stored in oak barrels on the island of Ireland for a minimum of 3 years. The barrels used in Teeling distillery were previously used to mature rum or wines.

While production of whiskey in Teeling distillery is around 500 000 liters annually, selling (for now) is limited to the whiskey stock made by Johns’ and Stephens’ father. The first bottle of single pot still was opened 39 days after our visit. Debeli was seriously thinking of going back to try this one, but he was more than happy to taste whiskey aged in ex-bourbon barrels and finished in chestnut casks together with the The Spirit of Dublin, bottled at 52% ABV.

After the tour, we had a whiskey tasting where Debeli tried three types while I tried a whiskey cocktail and a small batch whiskey.

Since I’m not a whiskey lover, just an ordinary gin(tonic) girl, I was pleasantly surprised how the whiskey tasted sooooo good! It was very mild, with a nice smell, and very tasty!

Teeling small batch Irish whiskey and Red Leg Rebellion cocktail

Just a small addition to the story….Dublin’s most destructive fire of the 19th century was The Great Dublin Whiskey fire of 1875. The first flames started around 8pm on the 18th of June, just a mile away from today’s distillery, in a whiskey warehouse. The estimated damage was worth around 6,5 million euros today.

The fun part was, after the fire department stopped the fire by mounding horse manure on the flaming liquor, the whole city felt a bit tipsy after inhaling the whiskey fumes. 🙂